Meeting customer expectations

Chubb fills its niche with SAS Customer Analytics

Today's insurers are creating specialized products to meet the individual needs of art collectors, owners of midsize businesses and professionals in particular industries. While the demand for specialized policies is on the rise, the key to marketing and selling them still lies in the ability to segment and analyze customer data at ever-finer levels.

Well-known for its specialty insurance products and its premium personal and commercial coverage options, the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies counts on SAS Customer Analytics to market its products to the right customers, to develop new products that meet customer needs and to make sure Chubb operates in areas where the company's customer base is most likely to benefit.

“We rely on SAS in four key areas at Chubb,” says Jeff Hoffman, Senior Vice President of Market Planning and Performance. “SAS is a strategic resource for customer segmentation, customer prospecting, market assessment and data quality."

SAS converts raw data into useful information, and helps us focus on producing clean, consolidated results so we can have a system in place to optimize all our BI efforts.

Jeff Hoffman
Senior Vice President, Market Planning and Performance

Making decisions with confidence

Chubb first experienced the power of SAS Customer Analytics in 2001. At that time, the company's personal insurance group began providing independent agents with targeted prospect lists based on insights from SAS. The results were immediate, yielding higher growth rates and lower costs for customer acquisition. Since then, Hoffman has expanded the use of SAS so that thousands of users at every level of the company rely on SAS Business Intelligence.

"People feel that they're making decisions more confidently now than ever before," explains Hoffman. "In the past, information that was used for decision making in the sales and marketing area was fractured and wasn't easy to accumulate. People generally felt less confident that they had access to, and were reviewing, a complete set of pertinent information to help drive their decisions."

Moving closer to customers

Chubb also uses SAS to develop market assessments that help determine strategies within specific territories.

"Our market assessments are used to enhance our decisions around distribution planning, new business growth strategies and budgeting," explains Hoffman. "SAS helps us from a strategic standpoint in identifying the strength of our distribution within a specific territory and determining segments as targets within a specific region, state or county."

Using SAS, Hoffman's staff is able to combine and analyze data from internal and external sources, including demographic census data, corporate data from Dun & Bradstreet, customized industry data from MarketStance, and historical underwriting and claims data.

Operations executives can even drill into the results to determine the specific product segment. "We've developed an online, on-demand reporting system that makes this critical market data available to our leaders in our field offices," Hoffman says. "We've been able to identify segments where we can re-allocate resources for a certain line of coverage or a certain type of product that we're selling, based on the market opportunity that presents itself."

As a result, he adds, "The quality of the business that we're writing is improving because we're targeting our staff and our independent agents to spots where we believe there is the best match between customer need and what we believe is a valuable Chubb client."

Chubb uses SAS to help guide the sales process – for example, suggesting additional products for existing customers based on predictions about their next logical purchase. "We've seen a significant marketing conversion lift on those accounts that we've modeled versus those we haven't,'' Hoffman says.

Data quality drives BI

According to Hoffman, SAS data access and data quality technologies are at the core of the company's business intelligence success. "SAS converts raw data into useful information and helps us focus on producing clean, consolidated results, so we can have a system in place to optimize all our BI efforts," he says.

Whether for market assessments, customer segmentation or prospecting, Chubb uses SAS to ensure accurate and complete results. "SAS is at the heart of all our customer and market analysis," says Hoffman. "It's able to access all the data sources, bring those data sources together, and present new ideas and new information to many different users."

In addition to providing a platform for valuable business insight, SAS has encouraged change at Chubb, Hoffman says. "SAS has helped transform the mindset of the organization to accept new information and new business intelligence as part of our strategic decision-making processes at Chubb."

Challenge

Gain a clearer understanding of customers to develop and market the specialized products they need.

The results illustrated in this article are specific to the particular situations, business models, data input, and computing environments described herein. Each SAS customer’s experience is unique based on business and technical variables and all statements must be considered non-typical. Actual savings, results, and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual customer configurations and conditions. SAS does not guarantee or represent that every customer will achieve similar results. The only warranties for SAS products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements in the written agreement for such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Customers have shared their successes with SAS as part of an agreed-upon contractual exchange or project success summarization following a successful implementation of SAS software. Brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.